A few more days from now, the latest and hopefully the greatest version of one of the most popular Linux distributions will be released. For those of you who loved Fedora 10, then the reasons are plenty for you to like version 11 (codename Leonidas) more.

To get everyone excited, let's take a look at some of the many great features that the upcoming Fedora 11 will incorporate:

Faster Boot SpeedProbably a shot at beating the boot speed of Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackaope", Fedora aims to startup or to be at login screen (GNOME) in 20 seconds or less. As they say, a faster boot makes for happy users.

Automatic Fonts & Mime InstallerThis new feature will certainly make Fedora much friendlier to Linux newbies. Users will be able to automatically install applications, fonts, multimedia codecs and clipart in just a few clicks. There's also a new popup like when you try to play an unsupported media file, open an unknown file, or use fonts that are not suitable.

Improved Power ManagementLaptop and netbook owners will have a good reason to use Fedora 11 since the developers are working hard on conserving battery power consumption. With the use of new measuring tools, they were able to locate power greedy applications that led to tuned daemon, which can automatically set the power saving levels.Significant RPM UpdateRPM 4.7 has notably improved over its previous version in terms of performance. Memory consumption has been reduced a lot. A test-case of "everything install" of Fedora 10 used to top at near 1.5GB memory consumption, now the peak with the same package set is just over 300MB. For users, this means a much faster upgrades and improved handling of failed upgrades.

Flexible and Easy-to-use Volume ControlTo make volume control more intuitive and user-friendly, Fedora 11 will ship with a revised volume control and sound user interfaces. The result is an easily understandable and much more flexible volume control model. To somehow let you know what I mean, here are a few screenshots:

Updated ApplicationsEssential programs and applications like GNOME, KDE, Xfce, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Python are upgraded to their latest versions.

You will find these and more on the latest approaching version of Fedora. So will you be in for one wild night (I mean release)?